From book clubs to the history of sewing machines, TSA shares some of our textile event recommendations for this Spring season!
Virtual Insights: Intimate Stories Through Textiles
American Folk Art Museum
Tuesday, March 21, 2023, 1:00 PM EST
Virtual Conversation
Join curators Emelie Gevalt and Sadé Ayorinde behind the scenes of What That Quilt Knows About Me to learn more about the artworks, the artists and the themes included in this exhibition. Featuring approximately 40 quilts and related works of art from more than two centuries ago into the present, the exhibition What That Quilt Knows About Me presents a large and rich selection of artworks chosen from the Museum’s own collections of American textiles.
Inviting the viewer to admire quilts up-close and from a distance, their visual beauty and craftsmanship beyond their utilitarian function, this curatorial presentation will provide an in-depth study of quilt making in the United States. The curators will share how artists have continually drawn inspiration from and pushed at the boundaries of needlework to incorporate surprising materials and ideas, challenging us to reconsider the practice of quilt making, its tradition and history.
Annual Sinton Lecture: Invisible Blue with Rowland Ricketts
Textile Arts Council
Koret Auditorium, de Young museum
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
Saturday, March 18, 10:00 AM PT
Presented In-Person and Virtually via Zoom
In this presentation, Rowland Ricketts will discuss his work growing, processing and dyeing with indigo on his farm in Indiana. His art is a reflection on indigo’s material properties and its global context. Special emphasis will be placed on recent works that make palpable the invisible aspects of the color’s creation as well as the invisible histories and forces that lie below the surface of this globally revered dye.
Rowland Ricketts utilizes natural dyes and historical processes to create contemporary textiles that span art and design. Trained in indigo farming and dyeing in Japan, Rowland received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2005 and is a Professor in Indiana University’s Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design. His work has been exhibited at the Textile Museum in Washington, DC, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Seattle Asian Art Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum Renwick Gallery. Rowland is a recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship.
Museum Reads:”The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World” by Virginia Postrel
A virtual and in-person book group for adults
Newport Art Museum
76 Bellevue Avenue
Newport, RI 02840
Thursday, April 20, 12:00 PM EST
Presented In-Person *and* Virtually via Zoom
In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel synthesizes groundbreaking research from archaeology, economics, and science to reveal a surprising history. From Minoans exporting wool colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to Romans arrayed in costly Chinese silk, the cloth trade paved the crossroads of the ancient world. Textiles funded the Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; they gave us banks and bookkeeping, Michelangelo’s David and the Taj Mahal. The cloth business spread the alphabet and arithmetic, propelled chemical research, and taught people to think in binary code.
American Innovation: The Invention of the Sewing Machine
The National Association of Scholars
Tuesday, May 2, 2:00 PM EST
Virtual Talk
The sewing machine allowed for the mass production of cheap textiles, pushing up demand both for cotton and other raw materials and for the textiles themselves. What is the story behind the development of the sewing machine? What were its effects?
Exhibition Program: Artist Talk With Anne Lindberg
George Washington University Museum
Tuesday, April 11, 7:00 PM EST
Virtual Talk
In over 35 years as a visual artist, Anne Lindberg has worked within broad definitions of drawing and textiles in two and three dimensions. Her work currently includes graphite and colored pencil drawings on mat board and architecturally scaled, immersive sculptural installations made with volumes of fine chromatic thread pulled taut through space. While her work has a basis in abstraction, embedded within its formal and material language are concerns of time, sequence and causality, as well as a drive to speak about what is private, vulnerable, fragile and perceptive of the human condition. In this virtual talk, Lindberg will speak to the provocative space between textiles and drawing where she creates visual and bodily experiences that transcend language and suggest the presence of alchemy in everyday life.
Contemporary artist Anne Lindberg’s immersive installation what color is divine light? transforms light and thread into a site for contemplation and reflection on connections with ourselves, communities and individual conceptions of the divine. A series of programs within the gallery bring community members together for shared experiences designed to foster understanding and transcendence.
TSA BOARD SELECTS
Events and exhibitions on the calendar of industry insiders and pros
GIO SWABY
FRESH UP
May 28 through October 2, 2022
The Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg FL is proud to present the first solo museum exhibition of multidisciplinary artist Gio Swaby (b. 1991, Nassau, Bahamas), whose work explores the intersections of Blackness and womanhood. Employing the portrait genre and a range of textile-based techniques, Swaby’s work is anchored in a desire to present and celebrate the complex personalities of the sitters. Interested in restorative forms of resistance, she has stated, “My work operates in the context of understanding love as liberation, a healing, and restorative force. These pieces celebrate personal style, strength, beauty, individuality, and imperfections.”
Swaby works in series form, and the exhibition will feature bodies of work spanning 2017 through 2021. Growing up surrounded by the threads and fabrics of her mother, a seamstress, Swaby chooses to work in mediums traditionally associated with domesticity as a means to imbue her works with familiarity, labor, and care. Swaby upends tradition, however, and gives the sewing medium a sense of monumentality with the life-size series Pretty Pretty. The subjects are intricately rendered in freehand lines of thread, and shown on the reverse side of the canvas so that the stitching process—its knots and loose threads, so often hidden—is visible. There’s a vulnerability to “showing the back,” but Swaby embraces and elevates the imperfections.
Upcoming sites
Art Institute of Chicago (AIC): April 8, 2023 – July 3, 2023
Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA): Aug 12, 2023 – Nov 26, 2023
Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated catalogue with over 60 works in full color that span 2017-2021. Published by Rizzoli Electa, the book features an interview between Swaby and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones that gives context to the artist’s career trajectory as well as a frank discussion of art and accessibility.
Also in the catalogue are personal texts by Swaby, which introduce each of the seven series that are part of the exhibition, and essays by co-curators Katherine Pill, MFA Curator of Contemporary Art, and Melinda Watt, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Chair and Christa C. Mayer Thurman Curator of Textiles.
Release Date: April 12, 2022
If you caught our Member Monday profile on Kyle Marini and were inspired to learn more about Andean textiles…
Ser Pallay is a collaborative art project that brings together textile artists and weaver artists associated at the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco – CTTC around the creation of kunan pallaykuna, most accurately translated as “contemporary Andean textile iconography”. Traditionally Andean textiles are made up of two inextricable elements: pallay and pampa. Pallay, which means textile design, is part of a complex vocabulary through which Andean communities express their ways of thinking and feeling in several textile pieces employed in their everyday lives, such as the lliklla, poncho and more. Pallay is only possible thanks to its complementary opposite: a plain, monochromatic textile where no design has sprouted yet, called pampa.
In 2023, Ser Pallay arrives at ICPNA’s gallery in the Historic City Center of Lima to share the project’s creative process with the audience of the capital and open a conversation about the regional textile traditions of Cusco, represented by family heritage textile pieces that the weaver artists have identified as ancestors to their contemporary production.
One of the key propositions behind Ser Pallay has been to create a space for dialogue, knowledge-sharing and co-authorship between artists who, in spite of their different origins and training, share a real commitment with the practice of weaving and the preservation of Andean textiles. In April, the group will also launch Ser Pallay’s publication in the context of the Lima art fairs and we will also share more information about those.
Artists
Alipio Melo, Celia Sabina Pfoccohuanca, Cintia Ylla, Cristina Ylla, Hermelinda Espinoza, Luz Clara Cusihuaman, Miriam Quispe, Norma Ojeda, Verovcha and María José Murillo.
Curator
Florencia Portocarrero
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